The Infatuations

Widely regarded as one of Europe's top authors and, it can be argued, the best novelist writing in Spanish today, Javier Marías has, in his latest work, written an arresting story of love and crime. The first-person narrator of "The Infatuations" is a young woman smitten with a man and his wife - the "perfect couple," in her eyes - whom she routinely observes having breakfast at the same cafe she frequents in an upscale district of Madrid. A discreet voyeur, María Dolz develops fervent, if reserved, feelings for Miguel and Luisa even as she, imaginatively, makes up stories about them for her own private consumption. While she is away on vacation, an act of violence interrupts this placid order of things, and the novel turns into a slowly unfolding tale of perception and detection.

Not your typical mystery, "The Infatuations" features one protracted scene after another. Objects are described and events narrated in the utmost detail. Interspersed within these lengthy passages - brilliant, if at times slightly tedious - are sudden flashes of narrative exhilaration. The plot at times appears to come to a standstill, and the novel itself begins to morph into something else that invokes the meditative pauses of essays, as finely nuanced as anything by Montaigne. But then, unexpectedly, an incident will trigger as much excitement as can be had in the tensest of thrillers.

Indeed, María finds herself more than once in the middle of splendidly crafted episodes of Hitchcockian suspense. Dialogue unfolds intermittently. A passionate utterance is followed by long brooding paragraphs in which she, vividly and strangely, recalls the past in all its minutiae and speculates profusely about the future. Only after these memories and conjectures is the next line of dialogue allowed to be heard.

Likewise, she devotes numerous sentences to describing the lips of Javier Díaz-Varela, Miguel's best friend, but says hardly anything about the rest of his body. In this tale of envy, "Macbeth" is invoked several times, while long citations from "The Three Musketeers" shed light on the act of murder. Oddly, these fragments and digressions, which in a lesser stylist might act as irritants, whet the readers' appetite, as we eagerly follow María's measured progress through a few cafes and apartments in Madrid.

Then again, much of the novel happens mainly in María's mind - or, obsessively, in what she feels is occurring in the minds of others. After Luisa tells her what Miguel must have been thinking at a given moment, she dreams up her own version of Miguel's thoughts. She also imagines what Miguel must have felt about Luisa on that same occasion, or what he might have told Díaz-Varela about it; or what Díaz-Varela must have thought that she, María, was thinking.

A literary person who works for a publishing house and believes in literature as a form of knowledge, she even mentally writes her own passages for a novella by Balzac so that it can fit her present circumstances. Almost imperceptibly at first, this relentless inner storytelling comes to occupy a substantial portion of the text. If María is Marías' creature, one has the impression that she too has enough materials to create a novel of her own - a subjective psychological tale that, in fact, lives in the fabric of "The Infatuations" as dramatically as the actual events in the plot.

Following Spain's long tradition of fiction about fiction from Miguel de Cervantes to Miguel de Unamuno, Marías introduces (as in some of his previous novels) a character named Francisco Rico, whose fictional persona neatly coincides with that of Francisco Rico, a famous scholar of Spanish literature known for a canonical edition of "Don Quixote." Providing a rare moment of humor, Rico faults Luisa for having in her own library a lesser edition of the book.

But the self-reflexive workings of Cervantes' work - what Borges called its partial magic - don't end there. Like Don Quixote, María is fond of telling herself stories, some of which may not be true; like Cervantes' proto-novel, Marías' text bravely unfolds in the boundaries between fiction and reality, where truth and fantasy merge or collide. Uncannily, a cardiologist mentioned in passing happens to exist in real life, as does the "odd-sounding" Anglo-American Medical Unit on calle Conde de Aranda, where he works.

These ambiguous regions, where untruths may confuse readers and characters alike, are also propitious for subtle love stories. Yet the state of falling or being in love - the enamoramientos of the novel's original title, a concept that according to Díaz-Varela exists as a noun only in Spanish and Italian - does not blind María, who learns the circumstances surrounding the murder and resolutely faces the truth.

But if conventional mysteries normally conclude with retribution and atonement, Marías' storytelling in "The Infatuations" remains a far more ambivalent space, a narrative realm where a story of murder is not necessarily a tale of crime and punishment.